A topical online community comprises a group of people interacting and sharing their views towards a topic of common interest. It may be a local or a worldwide community, providing a platform to people from different geographical locations to interact. A topical online community may be a blog, a web forum, a social networking website, a video-sharing website, and the like. A topical online community generally contains a plurality of topical community web pages also known as a fan page, a group or channel that contain data related to a particular topic. A member or user of the topical online community may access such a fan page, group or channel and thereon may access to data posted on the same. A popular example of a topical online community is Facebook®, where friends, acquaintances and the like may interact, share pictures, videos, like fan pages, subscribe to groups of their interest and a lot like it. Another example of a topical online community is YouTube®, which provides a worldwide platform for people to share their videos wherein community members are free to watch or comment on the various videos posted by various people and may also subscribe to a channel related to a topic such as cricket, rock music, and the like. Yet another example is Twitter®, where the registered users can read, post short messages and comment on short messages. People can thus use such sites to interact with people globally and browse information relating to specific topics.
Online shopping is a form of e-commerce, which allows customers to purchase available products without having to go out of their homes to buy products of their choice. Online shopping also provides geographically distributed vendors to connect with their potentials customers without having to be physically located near them. At present, a large number of websites are available that are creating a global platform for online shopping. These websites allow their users to view entire lists of products they wish to buy, providing them with a wide variety of options to choose. The transactions also are made through secure encrypted communication pipes, thus, making it secure and comfortable for the customers to shop. In a scenario, a website may be a storefront for a particular brand or a particular merchant. In another scenario, a website may be a marketplace containing a collection of products aggregated across multiple merchants.
Such an online storefront may allow the customers to select and pay for an online product of their choice, including providing information about the product features, specifications, appearance, pricing, availability and the like. A major limitation of this system is that the products being displayed on the storefront may not be required by the users or may not be of any interest to the users. Another limitation of the systems and methods available at present is that a typical online storefront is located in a specific web address that a user needs to know and visit for making a purchase. Moreover, the storefront owner needs to expend money in order to advertise such a web address so that the potential customers know the web location of the storefront.
Though there exist a mechanism for contextual online ads providing a means for promotion of products or services that may be displayed to the customers based on their interests, however, such promotions may not necessarily lead to a sale. Online ads upon being clicked direct the user to a web page where a sale may be closed; however, a contextual online ad does not get the user to directly purchase an item. Moreover, the contextual ad may direct the user to a storefront that may not have the full context; hence, the products displayed at the storefront may not be context relevant. There exists a need for combining the benefits of a contextual advertisement with that of a topical online community for providing a contextual sales experience. Moreover, there exists a need for conveniently embedding a virtual storefront in a community web page that dynamically provides relevant product suggestions to community members thus helping a community web page, fan page, group or channel administrator to monetize his efforts.